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A happy discovery! This is a major late- silent-era gem on the order of Von Sternberg’s Docks of New York — a special treat that will please fans of director William Wellman — he revisited parts of it in a later talkie. It’s also a key movie in our education/adoration of the maverick actress Louise Brooks, the erotic sensation too hot and too independent for Hollywood.

Women suffrage movie 'Mothers of Men': Dorothy Davenport becomes a judge and later State Governor in socially conscious thriller about U.S. women's voting rights. Women suffrage movie 'Mothers of Men': Will women's right to vote lead to the destruction of The American Family? Directed by and featuring the now all but forgotten Willis Robards, Mothers of Men – about women suffrage and political power – was a fast-paced, 64-minute buried treasure screened at the 2016 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, held June 2–5. I thoroughly enjoyed being taken back in time by this 1917 socially conscious drama that dares to ask the question: “What will happen to the nation if all women have the right to vote?” One newspaper editor insists that women suffrage would mean the destruction of The Family. Women, after all, just did not have the capacity for making objective decisions due to their emotional composition. It

Katharine Hepburn movies. Katharine Hepburn movies: Woman in drag, in love, in danger In case you're suffering from insomnia, you might want to spend your night and early morning watching Turner Classic Movies' "Summer Under the Stars" series. Four-time Best Actress Academy Award winner Katharine Hepburn is TCM's star today, Aug. 7, '15. (See TCM's Katharine Hepburn movie schedule further below.) Whether you find Hepburn's voice as melodious as a singing nightingale or as grating as nails on a chalkboard, you may want to check out the 1933 version of Little Women. Directed by George Cukor, this cozy – and more than a bit schmaltzy – version of Louisa May Alcott's novel was a major box office success, helping to solidify Hepburn's Hollywood stardom the year after her film debut opposite John Barrymore and David Manners in Cukor's A Bill of Divorcement. They don't make 'em like they used to Also, the 1933 Little Women

Film scores aren't just for playing in the background any more. Ivan looks at how they're taking centre stage...

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Film soundtracks have always been a strange medium. The music relies on movies for their full meaning. They're so integral to a film and its mood that to listen to them away from the big screen can seem strange to many. Others, meanwhile, take the chance outside of the cinema to pore over them in detail, or use them for background music while running or working (How to Train Your Dragon's on now, if you're wondering). It's only in recent years that another way of listening to them has become popular again: with your eyes.

Do a quick Google for "film with live score" and you'll discover a whole heap of events currently happening around the UK in which orchestras accompany a screening. Why the sudden trend? Is it

Scotland's only silent film festival was born of the determination of a Bo'ness local to bring the big screen to his doorstep

Festival name: Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema

Location: Bo'ness, Falkirk

Website: www.hippfest.co.uk

Dates: Annually, mid-March

About: With the best will in the world, Bo'ness seems an unlikely venue for a film festival, even something as quaint-sounding as a silent movie festival. But Bo'ness, a town with a population of about 14,500, perched on the banks of the Firth of Forth between Edinburgh and Falkiri, is the home of Scotland's only silent film festival. And it's all in honour of a local hero.

Louis Dickson, an electrical engineer turned cameraman, was a big noise in the early Scottish film business, grandly named the official "Kinematographer" of the Scottish National Exhibition in 1908. While he went on to take other official positions within the national film industry, Dickson's heart

Bristol's Translation/Transmission takes International women's day at face value with a documentary survey of women's activism around the world. The scope is equally diverse, from a 1970s deconstruction of Rapunzel to poet Audre Lorde's Berlin years. Each screening is accompanied by discussions and/or introductions. Taking a different tack, April's Birds Eye View film festival launches with a BFI screening of doc Wonder Women! The Untold Story Of American Superheroines, a celebration of female super-empowerment taking in the likes of Xena, Riot Grrrl and, of course, Lynda Carter.

The first full day of the 32nd Giornate del Cinema Muto, the world's most prestigious silent-film festival, took place exactly 86 years after The Jazz Singer premiered in New York. There were no mournful faces in the town of Pordenone, Italy, where the Giornate is held, however. In this corner of the world, for one week only, it is not quite as if the talkies never arrived, but rather that they failed to stop the party. Silent cinema continues to reinvent itself, to surprise even its most protective guardians, and to multiply.

The opening gala night of the festival featured a recent film that paid tribute to European silent cinema, Pablo Berger's invigoratingly

Had I not been lucky enough to see William Wellman’s 1928 silent film Beggars of Life years ago, or read the works of Gene Fowler, I might not know about Jim Tully, the scrappy Irish-American who became celebrated for writing about the subject he knew best: the hardscrabble life of an orphan turned boxer turned “road kid.” His most successful book (an autobiography in novel form), Beggars of Life came to the screen with Wallace Beery, Richard Arlen, and Louise Brooks in the leading roles…and ironically, the onetime hobo spent the last twenty years of his life in Hollywood, paying the bills by writing first for Charlie Chaplin, and then for a variety of fan magazines...

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Mark Kermode, history will relate, is a man with an appropriately cinematic origin: his name, look, and place in cultural life are clearly the result of a failed experiment with a matter transporter in which the genomes of Frank Kermode and Mark Lamarr were accidentally spliced. Here is an erudite critic with a proper appreciation of schlock; a celluloid-loving fogey who candidly prefers Breathless to À Bout de Souffle; and a man with the vanity to sport a quiff, yet who identifies himself as a jowly doppelgänger for Richard Nixon. This is the book of his mid-life crisis. If he's been a film critic for a quarter of a century (and, what's more, the "most trusted" in the UK according to a 2010 YouGov poll), what's the point of his existence when Sex and the City 2 is a smash hit?

Musical accompaniment enhanced the mood of silent films, as this year's British Silent Film festival made loud and clear

Harpo Marx lasted just two weeks as a silent film pianist – and it's no wonder. The poor bloke only knew two songs (Waltz Me Around Again, Willie and Love Me and the World is Mine), which he would rotate, speeding up or slowing down his fingers in hopes of fitting the music to the action on the screen. Luckily, not all players had such limited repertoires, and the 14th British Silent Film festival (held over the weekend, at the Barbican, BFI Southbank and Cinema Museum in London) explored the forgotten quirks and grand achievements of silent film accompaniment.

Whether gathering testimony from filmgoers, or unearthing old scores in archives, the project to discover what cinemas in the silent era really sounded like is a vast one. Evidence is hard to find,

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